The Affirmative Action Candidate?

One of the unintended consequences of affirmative action is that it casts a shadow of doubt over any minority hired under its auspices. Originally designed to force companies to consider all qualified candidates for positions (as opposed to only white males), AA has come to be looked upon as the worst of political correctness.

The sloppy hiring of a few underqualified candidates has tainted the whole system. Companies which felt pressured to increase the numbers of minorities on their staffs have gone to enormous lengths to count employees as minority hires, even when the person was obviously not a minority.

I actually knew a man that this happened to. His father was British, his mother American. They divorced when he was very young and, eventually, his mother remarried to a man with a Hispanic surname. The stepfather adopted the boy, giving the person of British and American ancestry a Hispanic last name. But to employers, this man (and later, his wife and children) was Hispanic and always used as an affirmative action hire, even though he told the employers he was white.

I've watched more than a couple of people struggle with being the "affirmative action baby" for a company. They want to be hired and promoted based on their outstanding qualifications, not because of their skin color or the "z" on the end of their name. These people understand the ugliness of prejudice and discrimination, but they also recognize the damage that underqualified minorities do to future minority candidates. And so, these workers balance being a "tool of the man" versus getting ahead and proving themselves.

It occurred to me that this election has sort of become the triumph of the worst ideas of affirmative action. Barack Obama is not a man of great accomplishment; he is a man with a shadowy, hidden past who reads well and is pleasant enough to look at.

Like the worst affirmative action hires, he is underqualified for the job he seeks. He has no executive or decision-making experience. His policy ideas are largely outside mainstream thought. His foreign policy accumen is nonexistent. His economic plan is naive, unworkable, and will punish the productive while rewarding inaction. His judicial nominations will be chosen not for their outstanding intelligence or reasoning, but based on immature concepts such as past experience or "empathy." I don't want a judge who has been selected because he/she "knows what it's like to be a teenage mom." I want judges who know and adhere to traditional concepts of Anglo-American jurisprudence and applies the law in intelligent and recognizable ways.

We have been told there are good reasons to vote for Barack Obama. Some supporters have done a better job of making the case for Obama than others. But for most Obamaniacs, the reason to vote for their candidate is because of his skin color. Like the teachers who are pushing the "history making" aspect of the Obama campaign, these people seem less concerned about what it takes to be a president than they are about feeling good. It's obvious that, to these voters, whatever Obama does in office will not be damaging for us as a nation; they simply don't consider it important that a Democratic Congress and Democratic president would create the perfect storm for terrible domestic and foreign policy choices.

No, better to feel good and pat oneself on the back for "breaking the color barrier." After all, life has been hard. We are at war. There is a deficit. The country's financial system is shaky and we are starting to read of large scale layoffs. Big companies are failing and bigger ones are being propped up. Insecurity is on the rise. Why not feel good about something?

It's as if the election of a black man is the drug of choice, the opiate of the masses, these days. My hope is that America will not suffer too greatly if this willful blindness selects the most underqualified president ever for the highest affirmative action position we've ever seen.